1-2-3 Blog Myself

Christie tagged me with this awesome Page 123 game. I needed to chose 3 favourite books I have read, I go to page 123 and move down 5 sentences and write out 5 sentences! (more or less). I enjoyed doing this one.

Patrick Süskind's first novel, Perfume (Das Parfum) tells the horrific story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan born in Paris in 1738. When Grenouille's abandoned body is found in the garbage, he is taken to an orphanage, where everyone who comes into contact with him finds something about him to be revulsive. What they are unaware of is that Grenouille's body does not have any aroma, a distinction which is so subtle that nobody can place their finger on it, but which colors Grenouille's entire life. Grenouille's strange relationship to odors is further highlighted by his own extremely sharp sense of smell, caused, perhaps, by the lack of necessity to sense past his own smell.

Pg 123 Reads:

Even by the light of day, the region was so dismal and dreary that the poorest shepherd in this poverty-stricken province would not have drive his animals here. And by night, by the bleaching of the moon, it was such a god-forsaken wilderness. It seemed not of this world. Even Lebrun, the bandit of the avergne, thought pursued from all sides, had preferred to fight his way through to the Cevennes and there be captured, drawn and quartered rather than to hide out on the Plomb du Chantal, where certainly no one would have sought or found him.

Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America is a book by travel writer Bill Bryson, chronicling his 13,978 mile trip around the United States in the autumn of 1987 and spring 1988. He begins his journey, made almost entirely by car, in his childhood hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, heading from there towards the Mississippi River, often reminiscing about his childhood in Iowa. The journey was made after his father's death, and so is in part a collection of memories of his father in Des Moines while he was growing up.

Pg 123 Reads:

No one knows why they might have done this, but fifty years later when European explorers arrived in Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians told them that there was group of pale people living in the hills already. People who wore clothes and had long beards. These people, according to a contemporary account, "had a bell which they rang before they ate their meals and had a strange habit of bowing their heads and saying something in a low voice before they ate". No one ever found this mysterious community. But in a remote and neglected corner of the Applalachians, high up in the clinch Mountains about the town of Sneedville in north-eastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons who have been there for as long as anyone can remember.

Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits chronicles the lives of three generations of the Trueba family of Chile.

The story starts, however, with the del Valle family, focusing on Clara and Rosa, mainly. The youngest daughter, Clara del Valle, has paranormal powers and keeps a detailed diary of her life. Using her powers, Clara predicts a death in the family. Shortly after this, Clara's green-haired sister, Rosa the Beautiful, is accidentally poisoned and dies as a result. Clara accidentally watches her sister's autopsy and afterwards, terrified, stops speaking, believing her words caused her sister's death.

Pg 123 Reads:

Dr Cuevas, whom Clara no longer feared, calculated that the birth would be some time around the middle of October. It was already the beginning of November and Clara was still swinging her enormous belly around, in a state of semi-somnambulance, ever more distracted, more exhausted, and more asthmatic, indifferent to everyone around her, even her husband. From time to time, she didn't even recognise him and would ask "May I help you?" when she noticed him stand by her side. Once the doctor had ruled out the possibiltiy of a miscalculation in the date and it was evident to all that Clara had not the slightest intention of giving birth the normal way, he proceeded to open her belly and extract little Blanca, who proved to be an uglier, hairier child than usual.

I now need to tag five other book lovers to do the same. Here are my choices: